Currently, people are using computer systems in an attempt to locate people that are experts, or highly knowledgeable, in a specific subject matter area. This type of expert searching is of growing importance, particularly in relatively large companies. For instance, in companies that have several hundreds, to many thousands, of employees, it can be very important to find knowledgeable people, within the company, about certain subject matter areas. This greatly assists in leveraging the knowledge of individuals in the company, in order to obtain efficacies.
Some current searching systems attempt to accomplish this task by generating a model indicative of how often a person authored a type of document. While this type of system does identify authors, it is not highly effective in identifying experts in subject matter areas that are relevant to a given query.
Of course, current information retrieval systems receive a query and attempt to retrieve documents relevant to that query. These types of information retrieval systems are, as with the ones mentioned previously, not highly helpful in identifying persons having a great deal of knowledge in a subject matter area relevant to a query.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.